Lukas Foss [Lukas Fuchs] Biography

German-born American composer. He studied in Berlin and Paris before moving in 1937 with his family to the USA, where he was a pupil of Thompson at the Curtis Institute and Hindemith at Yale ( 1939 – 40 ). He started composing as a neo-classicist, inclining towards Copland's popular manner in such works as his cantata Prairie ( 1944 ), to words by Carl Sandburg ; during this period he was also a pianist with the Boston SO ( 1944 – 50 ). A post as professor of composition at the University of California in Los Angeles ( 1951 – 62 ) took him to a different climate, and in 1956 he began improvising with his students and writing aleatory scores, including Time Cycle for soprano and orchestra ( 1960 ) and Echoi for four instruments ( 1961 – 3 ). He was then appointed conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic ( 1962 – 70 ), and during this period produced an early example of postmodernism in his Baroque Variations for orchestra ( 1967 ), in which music by Handel , Scarlatti , and Bach is subject to distortion, multiple imaging and ‘composition by deletion’ (i.e. composing holes into the originals). Latterly he has worked as a teacher and conductor in Cincinnati and New York, and continued his quirky compositional life.

Bibliography and More Information about Lukas Foss [Lukas Fuchs]

• K. J. Perone , Lukas Foss: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1991)

Paul Griffiths